Author: Thavered

This is certainly worth reading about. A new coalition which includes Shanghai Land Group, subway operator Shanghai Shentong Metro and railway builder Pudong Railway will be transforming an area in Shanghai into a booming business area that will include offices, shops and cultural locations. They have 254,300 square metres in Pudong with a combined gross floor area of 1.37 million square meters.

China probably isn’t the place you think of when you want to buy a world class wine, but maybe it should be soon. Ao Yun is a new label from the global wine and alcohol giant Moët Hennessy which found some abandoned vines at the foothills of the Himalayas about a decade ago. The started to produce a limited-edition Cabernet Sauvignon that they named Ao Yun, which means “Above the Clouds.” The bottles are coming to the States and cost a bit more than $300. And they are actually getting some good reviews! It’s worth checking into and watching this Chinese company.

Many young people from Hong Kong have been investing overseas. As one young person said, “My income will never catch up with the galloping home prices in Hong Kong,” she said. Instead, she bought a flat in Bangkok, where she goes to visit twice a year.

Hong Kong home prices are expected to rise another 10-20% in 2018. The city is actually ranked as the world’s least affordable for home buying by the Demographia Housing Affordability Survey. Flats there cost, on average, 18 times the annual median income.

Wealthy young investors have also set their sights on Tokyo and Osaka in Japan.

Standard Chartered has a finance arm called Pembroke and together with Sichuan Development Holding, they are launching a join venture in Sichuan. This will allow them a foothold in the market where airlines will be spending $1tn on aircraft in the coming 20 years. Chinese money is expected to fund over a third of the $261bn aircraft leasing market by 2022.

SouChe.com has recently raised $335 million in a funding round that was led by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. They are a Chinese care trading site and are looking to expand in auto-financing and to potentially hit the American market. Alibaba is actually going to become the biggest backer of the site and they will integrate it into their own e-commerce services.

SouChe founder Yao Junhong said, “We are considering a U.S. IPO for next year, potentially towards the end of the year. But our finances are strong so we may not have to do it.”

The Hong Kong government is hard at work to change the restrictive tax exemption laws that it currently has on private equity funds; they are hoping that by doing so they will be better positioned to compete with Singapore and other markets. Financial Secretary Paul Chan explained recently in a blog post that changing the laws would help them to attract more private equity funds in Hong Kong.

Learn more about the issues and see how the government is trying to deal with the situation.

For those of you who are tech-savvy, Coolpad has just launched its Cool Play 6 smartphone in India. The phone includes 64 GB of internal storage with a 13 MP + 13 MP dual primary camera. It runs on Android 7.1.1 and has a stanby time of up to 300 hours.

Check out more details to be in the know and enjoy the technology that has arrived in India!

Japan Airlines is going to be increasing flights to the UK, Thailand and to other destinations in October. Their goal is to attract more business travelers and to raise their profitability. Currently, they fly one round trip daily between Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and London.

Currently, JAL has one round trip a day from Narita International Airport outside Tokyo to Bangkok

China is launching five pilot zones to try to promote “green finance.” These zones include Guangdong, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Xinjiang. Financial institutions in these areas will have incentives to provide credit and special funds for environmentally friendly industries. The programs will also focus on green insurance and on having banks explore new financing mechanisms that include emissions trading and water use permits.

China is currently in their fourth year of a “war on pollution” to try to reverse the damage that has been done with more than three decades of economic growth. The provinces, however, are having a hard time finding the money that is necessary to clean up their areas and to switch to cleaner types of energy.

Germany has made it clear that they welcome Chinese investments, after HNA Group, a Chinese conglomerate, raised its stake in Deutsche Bank.Beijing is encourages its corporate sector to expand overseas and the HNA investment reflects this broader Chinese push into financial services.

As BaFin President Felix Hufeld said on Tuesday,

“We believe it is fundamentally positive that capital is being invested in German banks. This of course includes foreign capital and of course Chinese capital. There is no black list of countries that are not allowed to invest with us. In this regard, this is a welcome development.”